Tag Archives: user interface

Salecalc.com 3.0 Updates

Greetings, folks! You may have noticed the updates we’ve been making to our site. These improvements include:

  • Updating the fees in our calculators to be accurate and current
  • Attention toward both mobile and desktop usability
  • Updating the look and feel of our calculators

Our changelog lists some of the changes we’ve made so far, and the work is still ongoing! In this post, we’ll look closer into some of the improvements we’ve made.

1. New Start Page

The salecalc.com home page with just one text input field.
The new salecalc.com start page.

Instead of the salecalc.com home page being our eBay profit calculator, we’ve introduced a brand new start page from which all your salecalc.com calculations can begin. Enter an optional payment or sale price amount, then choose a calculator! The chosen calculator will launch with the results for your specified payment or sale price, or with fresh defaults if no amount was entered.

The Amazon fee calculator's results screen via the salecalc.com start page.
Viewing Amazon fee calculator results launched from the start page.

If you launch the Amazon fee calculator with a start page value of 100, for example, it will load with the sale price field set to $100, and the desired net profit field also set to $100. The calculator’s results will show the overall breakdown based on these pre-filled and default settings. The sale price required to achieve the desired net profit of $100 will be shown as well.

Other calculators are launched in a similar way that make sense for the calculator. The PayPal fee calculator, for example, will launch with the fees displayed as if the entered start page value is a PayPal payment, or start fresh if no amount was provided.

Whether you launch a calculator with a value from the start page or with a blank value, you can adjust any of the calculator’s settings, such as item costs, at any time.

2. New eBay Fee & Profit Calculator

The eBay fee calculator's screen viewed from a desktop browser.
The online eBay fee calculator is inspired by our iOS app’s interface.

In the latest edition of our online eBay calculator we combine the strengths of and learnings from our desktop, mobile, and app versions of our eBay calculators. Users of our iOS app will find the interface of the new online calculator to be very familiar, while users of our classic version will notice the snappiness of the real time calculations and smooth chart animations as calculator values are entered.

3. New Mortgage Payment & Early Payoff Calculator

The mortgage calculator's screen on a desktop browser, providing a complete payment breakdown and ways to payoff the mortgage early.
The mortgage payment calculator breaks down the costs to owning a home, and can help plan out how to payoff a mortgage early.

There are many costs involved with owning a home. Our new mortgage calculator breaks down many of the details for you–from the payments made monthly to the grand total cost by the time a home mortgage is paid off. The mortgage calculator can quickly produce an amortization table for your mortgage with a customizable start day–in the past or in the future. New to the calculator is an early payoff section, which allows you to plan out extra payments to shorten the length of a mortgage. If you instead, want to target a specific early payoff date, the calculator will show you the one-time, monthly, or yearly extra payment required to meet that date. The extra payments can be set to start at any time during the mortgage period and the calculator will account for that. Just like our eBay calculator, the mortgage calculator visualizes results with a colorful chart that animates in real time as settings are entered. Don’t like the colors in the chart? Then refresh the page in your web browser, and the chart will get a brand new set of colors with your numbers intact!

4. New PayPal Fee Calculator

The PayPal fee calculator's results screen viewed from a mobile browser.
We like to keep it simple with the PayPal fee calculator.

Our new PayPal fee calculator keeps the ease-of-use of our previous version, but with a cleaner look and feel. It is also much more lightweight than our last version.

Having current PayPal fee rates in the calculator across the many countries and regions that PayPal supports is an ever moving target. To help with that cause, we’ve included a link in the calculator’s footer for fee rate update requests. The link launches a Google form where the PayPal fee rate information can be entered. When requesting a new or updated fee rate, include all fields so that we can get the calculator updated as soon as we can!

Thanks for taking the time to learn about our Salecalc.com 3.0 refresh. This post details just some of the progress we’ve made so far, and we aren’t finished yet!

PayPal Calculator Update: More International Fees and Editable Fee Rate

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve doubled the number of countries and regions supported in the PayPal Fee Calculator. In addition to the locations listed previously, we’ve added support for:

We added these locations because we’ve received a fair amount of visits from them, according to our traffic data.  If there’s any other country or region you would like for us to add specifically (and where PayPal is offered), let us know in the comments.

Here are direct links to PayPal’s fees pages for the locations we’ve added:

Another update to the PayPal Fee Calculator is the ability to use a custom fee rate, just in case the predefined rates are insufficient.  Simply click on the “edit” link next to the fee rate selector to set a custom fee rate.

PayPal fee rate selector

Click the edit link to set a custom fee rate.

PayPal fee rate editor

Enter a custom fee rate in the input boxes.

Lastly, we checked our listed fee rates and made sure they’re all still current with PayPal’s pages.  That sums it up for this round of PayPal Fee Calculator updates.

Salecalc.com Gets a Refresh and Plans for the Year

This site wouldn’t be of much value without our visitors so that’s why we want you to know that your feedback is important to us.  Among the things we’ve heard loud and clear from you are:

  1. The original eBay Calculator is great, don’t take it down!
  2. Handwriting fonts are nice but sometimes not the best choice.
  3. A dedicated mobile app would be sweet!

To address the first concern, we’ve decided to cancel the plan to decommission the original eBay Calculator.  The idea behind creating the new eBay Calculator was for it to eventually replace the original, but that was to the dismay of many users.  Instead, both the original and new eBay Calculators will remain up and running as the former is still used by many, and the latter offers the user interface responsiveness to support mobile web clients.

As you may have noticed, the look and feel of Salecalc.com is now more consistent across all of our pages.  We’ve removed the handwriting font as it’s been a top complaint about our new calculators, and we’re now using a color scheme that is truer to the original eBay Calculator.  We’ve also introduced a fun new logo.  We hope the changes will improve the usability of the site and offer a more recognizable identity.

Universal Navbar across for all calculator pages including collapsible eBay menu.

Universal Navbar for all calculator pages including collapsible eBay menu.

Some folks have been asking about a mobile app from us.  It’s easy to point out that our mobile-friendly eBay Calculator is designed to work on tablets and phones, but that’s not what they’re talking about.  They want something that can be installed on and launched natively from their mobile device, using the familiar user interface flows of that device.  We agree that nothing beats a dedicated mobile app so rest assured, we’re working on it.